Next stop: Baku? The capital of Azerbaijan wants to join the contemporary art-circuit, and it has apparently convinced former Guggenheim Museum director Tom Krens (left) that its bid is serious. Krens, still an advisor to the Guggenheim’s Abu Dhabi project, has been counseling the Azerbaijani government through his consulting form, Global Cultural Asset Management (GCAM). His job: make it happen.

ARTnews has the story on its website.

The envisioned museum, designed by Jean Nouvel and approved by the government of President Ilham Aliyev, would attempt to make Baku another Bilbao. The article says:

The contemporary-art museum is one of several museum projects that President Aliyev signed into being with a decree several years ago, among them a museum of independence, a museum of oil, and the renovations of the museum of carpets and the museum of visual arts–all with the strong backing of First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva. The decree stipulated a “new approach” to the activities of the country’s museums according to “international standards” of museum practice, as well as to “Azerbaijan national ideology.” Last spring, the first couple, along with Unesco director-general Koïchiro Matsuura, opened a provisional contemporary-art museum with a collection of more than 800 works by local artists. At the same time, Matsuura presented Azerbaijani artist Tahir Salahov with Unesco’s Picasso Medal for his cultural achievements.

ARTnews did not gain an interview with Krens but, drawing on information in an online journal called agitarch and other sources, says that Krens would also be involved in a master plan for the city. Costs, financing and other details have not been determined.

Stranger things have happened in the art world, but Baku seems like a long shot to me.

 

In early September, I visited the Montclair Art Museum to see its Cezanne and American Modernism exhibition, and I came away an even bigger fan of … Marsden Hartley.

And now I can talk about it, because my review of the show is now published, in today’s Wall Street Journal. (I had already written once about this exhibit, in July, when curator Gail Stavitsky answered Five Questions from me. But then, I hadn’t seen it.)

Of course, Cezanne is the master, but in an exhibit like this — which tries to show his influence on 34 American artists, including photographers like Steichen and Stieglitz, and Western artists — his works are not a revelation. So, instead of playing the game of “which work would I take home if I had my choice of one,” I instead tried to decide which disciple of Cezanne in this crop came out the best.

And it has to be Hartley. Stavitsky said in July that he was the one in the exhibit on whom Cezanne had the most influence, but that held no sway with me. I chose Hartley because, as I wrote for the WSJ, “he emerges his own man.” Viewers can see how Hartley learned, by imitating, yet — knowing his later works — also developed his own style. The two Hartley works here, a view of Mont Sainte-Victoire (there’s another on my July post) and a painting from Vence that is not in this exhibit but is much like one that is (I could not obtain an image of it), are from the late 1920s. Hartley had many more years of work ahead.  

As my review implies, not all the artists in Cezanne and American Modernism rose above homage and imitation. Go anyway: this story needed to be told, even if it’s not all happy endings.

 

The British magazine Art Review is out with its annual Power 100 list of the most important people in contemporary art. At the very top is Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Swiss curator/critic. Here’s a quick look at the Americans who rose to the top in various categories (i.e., they are not the absolute highest in each category):

Top U.S. museum director: Glenn Lowry, at No.2 on the list. 

Top U.S. dealer: Larry Gagosian, at No. 5

Top U.S. collector: Eli Broad, at No. 7

Top U.S. artist: Bruce Naumann, at No. 10

Top U.S. auction execs: Amy Cappellazzo & Brett Gorvy, at No. 26

Top U.S. curator: Ann Philbin, at No. 28

Top U.S. critic: Roberta Smith, at No. 61

The whole list is here, and if you really have time to spend, you’ll also find lists from earlier years there, so you can see who’s up and who’s down.

My turn to weigh in on the Metropolitan Opera’s new Tosca, but not the production. Rather, I want to comment on director Luc Bondy’s reaction, and the Met’s general stance about classic productions and the need for new versions. I did so in an opinion piece published today on Forbes.com.

Let me say from the outset that I’m not against reinterpretations, as long as they are tasteful and respect/enhance the music/libretto. I take issue with Bondy’s blame-the-audience response. Despite negative reaction from both audience members and from respected critics (many of whom disliked the production and could hardly be viewed as reactionary), Bondy’s public response was “I was scandalized that they were so scandalized. I didn’t know that ‘Tosca’ was like the Bible in New York.” He simply refused to countenance that he had laid an egg, to use Variety-talk.

I also take issue with the common belief that young people won’t attend, or like, classic productions. As I say in the piece,

Is it not condescending to suggest that work created before their time is off-putting or uninteresting to young people? They still appreciate a van Gogh, don’t they? And in recent weeks, the Metropolitan Museum has attracted hordes of people, young and old, to see Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid,” from 1657-58, and Michelangelo’s first painting, “The Torment of St. Anthony,” made in 1487-88.

Is there a complete difference between the musical and visual arts? I don’t think so.

You can read the whole Forbes piece here.

UPDATED, 10/15: Parterre Box parses the problem with reaction to Tosca at more length, and better, than I did.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Metropolitan Opera

This was in several hours ago, but I was away from my email — but I see no news item on it, so let me just post without comment:

Frederic C. Hamilton, Chairman of the Board of the Denver Art Museum, announced today the appointment of Christoph Heinrich as the new Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the Denver Art Museum (DAM) beginning January 1, 2010. Heinrich has been deputy director of the DAM since January 2009 and the Polly and Mark Addison Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art since October 2007. Heinrich will replace Lewis I. Sharp following Sharp’s December 31, 2009, retirement after 20 years as director.

UPDATED: Don’t expect many changes in the near future. The Denver Post quotes Henrich as saying: “There is in place, a very good, very stable and solid structure, and we we might tweak and we might open some new doors, but it won’t be a revolution.” Here’s the link.

And here’s more from the DAM press release:

With more than 15 years of experience in museums, Heinrich has organized more than 50 exhibitions including nearly 20 consisting of major loans from around the world. Heinrich came to Denver from Hamburg Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, where he spent the last seven of his 13-year tenure as Chief Curator for Contemporary Art, Collections and Exhibitions. He attended the Universitat Wien in Vienna, where he studied Art History and Dramatics. He later attended Ludwig-Maximilian-Universitat München, where he earned both his M.A. and Ph.D. Heinrich is a member of the Warhol Authentication Board and came to Denver to fill the role of curator of modern and contemporary art after an international search.
 
Since then, he has organized a reinstallation of the 17,000-square-foot modern and contemporary galleries and the first American museum exhibition for German painter Daniel Richter. In November, the Museum will debut Heinrich’s latest project, Embrace!, one of the most ambitious exhibition projects in the Museum’s history featuring 17 site-specific works by contemporary artists from around the world.

The entire release is here.